The world has changed and most businesses around the world have been impacted by the financial crisis. You can no longer predict what will happen one year ahead. However, many small business managers are now sandbagging when creating the next year's budget or saving turnover from this year's to get a head start on the new budget year.

- Your business performance management should be dynamic and easily adjustable if changes appear in the industry or market. You should monitor all strategic goals to be able to react fast on changes, explains Brian Jørgensen, founder and owner of Goalcube.com

Business budgeting is more than guessing about next year's financial results based on historical numbers. Annual reports and plans focused only on financial goals should be replaced with rolling 5-quarter financial forecasts updated quarterly. The rolling 5-quarter forecast should be supplemented with other goals. The goals should not only be financial but also nonfinancial goals, tracking performance of management, strategy, operations and HR goals. All goals should be monitored continuously and followed up on monthly with an easy, shareable dashboard.

- A system like Goalcube.com helps small businesses identify clear strategic goals and linked actions to accomplish each goal. Each employee has an actions list not only for strategic but also personal goals, to secure personal competence development, continues Brian Jørgensen, founder and owner of Goalcube.com

The newly launched Goalcube.com Web-based business consulting system is especially designed to help small businesses identify and follow up on specific goals and actions instead of just financial annual budgets. The system guides business managers through the steps of identifying goals for 6 different areas: Management, Strategy, Marketing, Innovation, Process optimization and HR.

For each goal, multiple actions should be initiated and all ideas and actions should have an owner assigned to make sure strategy is operationalized and not only something that management talks about. From the dashboard, the management team can easily follow up on all of the goals and actions to monitor the effects of the strategic direction.